Skip to main content

Cynthia Nixon - Cancer and same sex marriage




Despite a career of scripts and takes and prompts from offstage, Cynthia Nixon won't need much preparation to stand before the audience she will face today.
The actress, who will speak at the annual Gilda's Club "Surviving with Style" fashion show and luncheon at the Westin Seattle, knows cancer better than most.
Nixon's mother, now in her 80s, has survived three bouts of it.
In 2006, Nixon was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation.
And earlier this year, Nixon played the lead in the Broadway production of "Wit," about a university professor in the final stages of ovarian cancer. The role won her a Tony nomination. (She lost to Nina Arianda of "Venus in Fur.")
For her performance — a clear departure from her signature role as the wisecracking, high-powered, designer-dudded lawyer Miranda Hobbes on "Sex and the City" — Nixon said she didn't draw much on her own cancer experience.
Instead, she conjured the friends who had died of AIDS, the searing pain of childbirth and the time her mother spent in hospitals.
"I had a very minor breast-cancer diagnosis, minor surgery and six weeks of radiation," Nixon said from her home in New York the other day. "It bears no resemblance to a (character) who had aggressive chemotherapy and probably wouldn't make it.
"It had the same name," she said. "But a cat can be a kitten or a mountain lion. They're both cats."
Nixon was diagnosed while appearing onstage in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." She didn't go public until her treatment was over.
"I told almost no one," she said. "I told the women in the dressing room because they saw my bandages. [And] my mother ... you have enough on your plate, you don't want to manage everybody else's emotions."
Nor did she want "Brodie" audiences to know she was undergoing treatment.
"I think that would have been very distracting for people," she said.
And then there was the paparazzi.
"I am not besieged," she said, "but I didn't want them waiting for me when I was having radiation five days a week."
She praised Gilda's Club for "normalizing" cancer. "People with cancer are still people," she said.
Nixon arrives in the Northwest at an interesting time, as people across the state debate same-sex marriage.
The actress is a newlywed, having just married her longtime partner, Christine Marinoni, over Memorial Day weekend.
Are they registered anywhere?
"We're not," Nixon said with a laugh. "Please, no gifts."
Some believe being able to be married to your same-sex partner is gift enough.
Just days after Nixon's wedding, Preserve Marriage Washington submitted twice the number of signatures needed to put the issue of same-sex marriage on the November ballot here in Washington state.
"My wife's parents have been fighting (the petition)," Nixon said, adding that Marinoni is from Bainbridge Island.
"Washington state has traditionally been such a wonderfully progressive place," Nixon said. "There is nothing to be afraid of. ... Let people get married. Nothing will happen.
"You'll get to make a lot of gay people very happy, and you'll feel proud," she said. "That's how we feel in New York. Proud."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Kate Jackson Breast Cancer a flash back

THE MOST MOMENTOUS CHANGE IN Kate Jackson's life began early one morning in January 1987, during her fourth season on the hit TV series Scarecrow and Mrs. King. After a phone call informed her that the show's taping was canceled because costar Bruce Boxleitner had the flu, Jackson went back to sleep. When she woke several hours later, "It was out of the blue, but perfectly clear," she recalls. "I sat up in bed and literally said, 'You have to have a mammogram.' " She did, and two days later a biopsy confirmed her vague fears: A minute growth found in her left breast was determined to be malignant. "I was forced to face, squared up, my own mortality," says Jackson. "I had to decide whether I wanted to live or to die. And if you choose life, as I did, it's never the same." For three TV seasons 16 years ago, she was famous as Sabrina Duncan, a girl-next-door gone glamorous and the character critics dubbed the brainiest o

"Hard nipples" - areola or nipple skin

Someone once wrote"... when i get really cold, or get goosebumbs all over my body, the whole things really scrunch up, like, my entire areola scrunches itself up into a wrinkled little mound. it looks really weird and ugly, and i haven't ever seen other people's breasts do it. what is wrong with my areola/nipples??" The answer: Well nothing is wrong. This is what my areola does too. It's a normal reaction to the coldness or to irritation / stimulation. The little muscles in the areola do a similar goosebump thing as your other skin can do. People often call this phenomenon "hard nipples". Also note that skin on areola has less feeling or sensation to it than other areas of your body. If the areola was very sensitive, then breastfeeding would probably be quite uncomfortable because the baby pulls and tugs it! The nipples are sensitive but the sensitivity changes with hormonal changes, such as occur at mestrual cycle or pregnancy. Also this v

The four stages of breast development

In Stage 1 shows the flat breasts of childhood. By Stage 2, breast buds are formed as milk ducts and fat tissue develop. In Stage 3, the breast become round and full, and the areola darkens. Stage 4 shows fully mature breasts. (Illustration by GGS Information Services.) period begins. Usually these signs are accompanied by the appearance of pubic hair and hair under the arms. Once ovulation and  menstruation  begin, the maturing of the breasts begins with the formation of secretory glands at the end of the milk ducts. The breasts and duct system continue to grow and mature with the development of many glands and lobules. The rate at which breasts grow varies significantly and is different for each young woman. Breast development occurs in five stages: Stage One: In preadolescence, the breasts are flat and only the tip of the nipple is raised. Stage Two: Buds appear, breast and nipple are raised, fat tissue begins to form and the areola (dark area of skin that surrounds